The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [106]
On first sight, this only seems to bolster the case of Internet enthusiasts who celebrate the ease with which online groups can form. But as any tax collector would know, dividing a small pot of other people’s money in a scientific experiment is not the same as agreeing to cofund a Kandinsky exhibition out of one’s own pocket. Obviously, the weaker the common denominator among the members of a particular group, the less likely they would be inclined to act as a coherent whole and make sacrifices in the name of the common good. It’s little wonder that members of most Facebook groups proudly flaunt their membership cards—but only until someone asks for hefty membership fees. Since there are no sacrifices to make on joining such groups, they attract all kinds of adventurists and narcissists. Notes the Canadian writer Tom Slee, “Sure, it’s easier to sign up to a Facebook group than if you have to actually go and meet someone, but if signing up is so easy it’s not likely to be much of a group, just as an automated phone apology that ‘all our agents are busy right now’ is cheap, and so is not much of an apology.”
The widespread tendency to misread meaningless mutual associations, both offline and online, as something much deeper and politically significant is what Kurt Vonnegut was ridiculing in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, in which he wrote of the “granfalloon”: groups of people who outwardly choose or claim to have a shared identity or purpose based on rather imaginary premises. “The Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere” were Vonnegut’s most prominent examples. For Vonnegut, the granfalloon was based on little but air or, as he put it, whatever is “hiding under the skin of a toy balloon.”
The Internet, with its promise of fostering “virtual communities” on the cheap and widely advertised by the earlier generation of cyber-utopians as something of a panacea to many of modern democracy’s ills, has driven the costs of joining such groups to zero. But it’s hard to imagine how it could, all by itself, help cultivate a deep commitment to serious causes. This, at least for the foreseeable future, would be the task of educators, intellectuals, and, in some exceptional cases, visionary politicians. Not much has changed in that regard since 1997, when Oxford University’s Alan Ryan wrote that “the Internet is good at reassuring people that they are not alone, and not much good at creating a political community out of the fragmented people that we have become.”
Killing the Slacktivist in You
Alas, those charmed by the promise of digital activism often have a hard time distinguishing it from “slacktivism,” its more dangerous digital sibling, which all too often leads to civic promiscuity—usually the result of a mad shopping binge in the online identity supermarket that is Facebook—that makes online activists feel useful and important while having preciously little political impact.
Take a popular Facebook cause, Saving the Children of Africa. At first sight, it does look impressive, with over 1.7 million members, until you discover that they have raised about $12,000 (less than one-hundredth of a penny per person). In a perfect world, this shouldn’t even be considered a problem: It’s better to donate one-hundredth of a penny than do nothing at all. But attention is limited, and most people only have a few hours a month (perhaps an optimistic estimate) to spend